Anyone who has stood on the sidelines and watched children play football will
know that there's little point in introducing a ban on heading the ball,
writes Hugh Morris

Schoolboy football team selection is a crude process. Generally, the fastest two players get to be strikers, the two tallest become the centre backs and the last one to emerge from the changing rooms on the first day is the keeper. In the absence of any other left-footed players in my U8 football team, I was put at left back. And there I stayed until old enough to break free from the restraints of rigid fundamental tactics and reinvent myself as a ghosting winger.

The point of this pointless anecdote is that heading the ball was a central part of my role (along with simply thwacking the ball out of play, under the oh-so-English mantra “If in doubt, put it out"). It was my job to “get a head on it” from a goal kick, be the first man to clear a weak corner, and just generally stick my head or left foot wherever it was needed. Any semblance of finesse only entered the game during my late teens.

But teenage football could well become early-doors tiki-taka, after a motor neuroscience expert from the University of Birmingham said children should be banned from heading the ball for fear of causing brain damage. If Dr Michael Grey has his way, about 40 per cent of my job description would have been null and void – although, on the plus side, it would have given me more time to fine tune my thwacking.

To be honest, though, Dr Grey doesn't have as much to worry about as he thinks. In my experience of teenage and youth football – despite my position and role as stalwart of the defensive game – nobody could head the ball anyway.

More often than not the shout from the sideline of “DON'T LET IT BOUNCE” would be met by me, a few of my team-mates and a few from the opposition leaping like drunk salmons in the vague vicinity of the incoming ball, eyes closed, arms flailing, only for it to avoid all human contact and bounce another 20 metres into the keeper's arms. Goalkeepers those days prided themselves not on distribution but how high and far they could lump the ball. If you got into the arms of the opposition keeper on one bounce it was a small victory.

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Even in my older and more recent days of being a winger/forward, my ball-heading prowess poses no threat to my cognitive faculties. Watch any sort of 11-a-side game, or even a casual 5-a-side kickaround, and you witness any sort of remotely successful header respectfully appreciated by both teams as if a cricketer had hit a century.

Granted, heading a leather wrecking ball from the 70s is going to do some serious damage, as witnessed in the death of West Brom's Jeff Astle from a degenerative brain disease caused by continuous minor trauma from heading the ball. Even today, despite the advanced technology that goes into the footballs, there is every cause for concern at professional level, where cranial monitoring should be the norm. But banning kids from heading the ball? That just feels like an exercise in futility.

It will lead to a dramatic decrease in the quality of Headers and Volleys in the playground, the aforementioned salmon leaping will become much worse (which the goalkeepers will love) and the ever-tedious argument of what exactly head height means will become much more common. So let the kids head the ball 'til the cows come home. They can't bloody do it, anyway.